


the devil's got nothing on me, my friend

by althusserarien (ArmchairElvis)



Category: Elementary (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: BDSM, Drug Use, F/M, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Sherlock Holmes and Drug Use, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-14
Updated: 2016-11-14
Packaged: 2018-08-30 23:58:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8554735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArmchairElvis/pseuds/althusserarien
Summary: We admitted that we were powerless.





	

Victor Trevor is young and rich and attractive in a languid, public-school fuckup kind of way. It’s impossible for Sherlock to make an accurate assessment of his personality or intellect; he’s stoned 90% of the time that he’s conscious. From what he says of his family, Sherlock assumes that their fathers know each other; he hasn’t spoken to his own father since the day he deliberately failed the Oxford entry examination.

 

Victor sits down next to him in at the back of the lecture hall; as he’s shrugging his jacket on at the end of the hour, Sherlock feels his hand brush casually against his side.

 

He knows that Victor is going to invite him up to his room, and he knows that he’s going to say yes. He knows these things in the same way that he knows that his inorganic chemistry tutor doesn’t like him and that the boy living in the next room is cheating on his girlfriend. What he doesn't know is how to make meaning out of all these petty little connections and impressions; how to live when his skull buzzes with white noise.

 

They end up listening to an album by a rock band called the Manic Street Preachers – which Sherlock finds at best indifferent and at worst a melange of stereotypical alt-rock chord progressions – and doing fairly shitty coke off the cover of a book of film noir stills that looks to have never been opened.

 

Victor pushes him back on the single bed and pulls his shirt off, already hard, and what Sherlock wants then more than anything, right now, _here_ , is a something to drown out the noise, something that doesn’t seem like love, something that doesn’t feel like anything. Later, hungover, dumb and shivering in the shower, Sherlock thinks to himself, I shouldn’t see any more of him, it’d be a distraction. A week later, well, it's complicated.

 

Victor’s worried people will talk; he pushes him down greasy alleyways, where they’re always in danger of being discovered by some Saturday-night drunk, and jerks him off quickly. In bed, after frantic fights and even more frantic lovemaking, he languidly asks Sherlock who on their floor is fucking whom, in the indulgent way you might ask a child to recite their times table.

 

Sweat, the smell of lager and Rexona for men and B+H Gold, symmetry and spectroscopy, more than anything the chemical taste of cocaine drip at the back of his throat: that’s what he’ll remember about this, his penultimate term at university.  

 

Victor leaves him, a respectable eight days before the long vac begins, and he does it in the most sloppy and cowardly way; bringing home some hard-eyed young man who lies languidly in his bed, smoking and tapping the ash into a saucer. The only thing stopping Sherlock from doing something shameful and possibly permanent is the feeling that his insides have been scraped out and replaced with concrete.

 

“I love you,” Victor says, “but you don’t show me enough. You’re people-dumb. You’re cold.” 

 

That shows what you know about emotions, about me, Sherlock wants to say, but he doesn’t, not quite because he doesn’t know how to, but because he doesn’t think it’s worth it. There’s so much _noise_ ; in the end it’s easier just to leave. He packs a single suitcase; clothes and poisons and books he’ll never get around to returning to the university library; he leaves the rest for whoever wants it.

 

…

 

They’re in a sad, sterile little waiting room in the Charing Cross Hospital, Mycroft and he; everything seems rather dull and rather slow. Sherlock feels narcotized, remote within himself, and he wonders whether this is the effect of the medication or whether it’s simply the result of some catastrophic cognitive decline. He’s been twenty-five for three months; it feels like a continuous fall off something he can't even see the top of anymore.

 

Mycroft has a pack of cigarettes in his pocket, and he’s taken them out of his pocket and put them back again too many times to count. Conclusion: either nicotine withdrawal or stress. Dear old Mycroft, the dispenser of childhood sticking plasters and toast. 

 

72 hours and he’s free to go, subject to medical recommendations and other tired bureaucratic impedimentia, this last in accordance with §2 of the Mental Health Act 1983. Being sectioned, they call it; he feels more fragmented than anything. Drawn and quartered.  

 

“On Monday I noticed that you’d left the house without shaving,” Sherlock says. “And you missed a spot this morning.”

“Christ, little brother. I ran through a red light and took a shortcut down a one-way street. I wasn’t thinking about shaving.”  

 “It was merely an observation.”

  

Sherlock has a very bare room in a boarding house in a grey suburb his father would never think to visit, a thesis he never finished, a bank account with a lot of zeroes that he’s never touched. Mycroft is a _restaurateur_ and last month one of his _establishments_ was well reviewed in the Guardian, and they have exactly three things in common, one of them being their name. Their father is in Prague and their mother is dead and the whole thing is so dreadfully tiresome and sordid.

 

Violet Hunter, who committed her crimes while suffering from a defect of reason, is his first _real_ murderer. A pale trembling face, Thorazine-shuffling her way into a life sentence. A face behind a sheet of perspex sometimes dotted with watery gobs of spit. The anodyne smile of the receptionist, the white-knuckle briskness of the nurses.

 

"Someone told me it felt peaceful," she says. "Somebody told me that drowning felt like going to sleep." She draws her trembling lips down over her teeth.  

 

This, then is the year that he learns that nothing ever looks as dead or as sad as a child floating face-down in a bathtub. The year that he learns that living can feel like drowning. He thumbtacks the pictures from her crime scene up on the noticeboard. He scatters them across the floor. Remembering her voice becomes very easy; later it becomes very hard to forget. He lies on his single bed with his heart pounding, and he dreams of pale hands floating in the murky milk-pale light from the window.

 

Flat on his back on the cool bathroom tiles, a little too much a little too soon. Two milligrams of naloxone and a gasping shameful awakening in the fluorescent light of the casualty ward. It wasn’t peaceful. It felt like rehearsal.                              

 

“I didn’t know you still smoked,” he says, crossing his arms, feeling on his biceps the stinging itch of a new tattoo; something permanent he’d be around later to regret. 

“I quit.” Mycroft says.

 

…

 

 

He takes Irene to see Diana and Actaeon at the National Gallery (recently acquired for fifty million pounds) and realises later, belatedly, that she has probably already seen it. The marble halls are filled with white light; everything uncertain seems unimportant and the outline of everything else is very crisp.

 

He broke down and bought a pack of cigarettes this morning, but he hasn’t peeled the cellophane away yet. He’s in the middle of tracking down a serial killer and he has a concertina file full of terror threats of the dreary disgruntled-neighbour type. Despite this (because of this) he’s obscenely, indecently happy.

 

“They had an exhibition here a little while ago,” Irene says.

She’s standing in front of a painting of Samson and Delilah, face half-turned toward him, as if she doesn’t yet want to take her eyes off it. He can smell her perfume, something citrus-y and astringent that never seems quite _her_.

“A portrait that Walter Sickert painted himself, then passed off as a Delacroix. The guy who painted Liberty Leading the People.”

“Mmm,” Sherlock says.

“Wasn’t he supposed to be Jack the Ripper?”

“That’s a stupid rumour,” Sherlock says, “Based on a toxic and sensational process of guesswork and hearsay. Besides, Sickert was too public and too balanced.”

“You don’t think anybody could know a serial killer and not be aware of it?” 

“I didn’t mean that,” Sherlock says. “But in this case, the killer was so unstable and so profoundly angry that it would have been impossible, in my opinion, for him to have appeared innocuous to the people around him. To have managed a career as an artist would have been impossible.”

 “Him?” Her voice is gently mocking. She’s moved on from Samson and Delilah. Sherlock is belatedly aware that he’s speaking a little too loud; everything’s just a little too fast and a little too bright.

“Eighty-five percent of serial killers are male.”

“Indeed,” she says.

 

Later, they walk along Oxford Street in the gloaming. She’s watching the crowd, and Sherlock is watching her.

 

“You don’t seem to have a high opinion of art forgery.”

“Borderline morally repugnant and a waste of time and money,” Sherlock says. He enters into a short discourse on pigments and aging techniques and carbon dating and things of that nature, then realises that his sentences are piling up on each other and lights a cigarette instead. He hasn’t eaten enough today; his hands are shaking.

“You’re a strange man.” Her laugh is a low, harsh thing. It doesn’t suit her.

 

Almost five miles behind them as the crow flies is the place where a woman called Mary Ann Nichols was murdered, allegedly by a man the press called Jack the Ripper, almost certainly by the circumstances of her poverty and sex. One thing he thinks Irene need not know: the fact that he could probably lead her there with his eyes closed.

 

“It’s the mastery of it,” she says. “If it elicits the same emotional response that the original did, then it’s a masterpiece. What’s the value in a name?”

He feels his heart beat within his chest.

“Besides,” she says. “There’s something so deliciously intoxicating about impersonating somebody else. Learning to see and feel things the way that they did.”

 

Later, back at her place, she’s so urgent, so insistent, and it’s a long time since he’s felt like this, acted upon by external forces. Oh, he laps it up. He’s thirty-five and stupid and the only love he remembers is a remote family, a languid, potsmoking brother he never learnt to understand, cruel joyless schoolboy lovemaking (in that particular grammar exercise he was always the passive, never the active).

 

She trails kisses up his neck and whispers something he can’t hear. When she pulls two police-issue pairs of handcuffs out of the bedside drawer, he turns onto his stomach, his dick throbbing against the mattress. She’s a genius; she never leaves a mark.

 

Afterward, she pours him a drink – single malt -- with a knowing, private smile on her face. As he buttons his shirt, pulling it gently over his stinging back, he turns and sees that she’s looking at him, something like appraisal in her eyes.

 

“All those blank spaces,” she says. “It makes me want to design something you can put there.”

 

He snooped in the drawer of her bedside table a month ago, for no reason at all, and found a very illegal semi-automatic handgun with a round in the chamber and the safety on. He’s filed _that_ away in the part of his mind where he keeps things that it’s best not to think about: his mother’s drinking, the pain of that cracked ankle bone he walked around on for eight days, the things she won’t talk about.

 

…

  

 

> Subject stated that the defendant constantly presented her with an intricate and contradictory onslaught of information that made her doubt her convictions and her sanity. Subject further stated that for the last six months of her relationship with the defendant, she was presented with so many stories and constructions pertaining to the defendant’s whereabouts and business activities, that she was in a near-constant state of fearful confusion. Where the defendant had previously scorned her occasional drug use, he was now less discouraging.

 

Twelve months after Irene and two months into sobriety (how’s that for a pink cloud) he starts a monograph on gaslighting. He’s ten thousand words in when he prints it out, deletes the document, and shoves the printout between two books.

 

…

 

It’s a rich person’s rehabilitation facility. One of his father’s assistants has chosen it; Sherlock can’t remember her name. She is the one who delivered the ultimatums; he supposes that she has done a good job, also, of ending the relationships he has left. The whole thing is planned, now, and he supposes that there’s nothing he can do to change it. Nothing short of the drastic.

 

Lying on the floor of his bedroom, listening to the white noise of dreary daytime television, he wonders what to call his father’s assistant. Chief Assistant to Family Matters. Chairman of the Inaugural Addicted Son Committee. Sherlock thinks that her name could possibly be Marjorie. But that was the name of the victim of a murder he solved last year. No, two years ago, he thinks.

 

He was looking for some Xanax he long-ago pilfered from a crime scene, today, when he dislodged a small pile of papers. The notes from that case fanned out all over the floor; the glossy four-by-six prints of the last bag of groceries she ever bought, the elliptical bloodstains produced by the angle of her fall. A sordid, sad little story, really. They all are in the end.

 

There is nothing but milk and a withered Braeburn apple in his refrigerator. The brownstone smells like wet books. There is a disassembled revolver in the bath and toxic mould growing in the kitchen. On the table there are notes from Irene's case, a bunsen burner, sad little aborted projects and monographs, Oscar's fast-food detritus. 

 

The rehabilitation facility offers an introduction packet; the assistant, Not-Marjorie, has dutifully printed it off, and she clacks briskly into the room, trailing Chanel Coco, and lays it next to his head. On father's orders, no doubt. As if he could possibly be interested in anything other than flooding his opioid receptors. As if he could possibly be interested in anything. 

 

 _Substance_ is the word they use. The introductory booklet is a toxic cocktail of banalities and what seem to Sherlock to be outright lies. He is willing to believe that this is a symptom, that the promises of sobriety and stability made in the booklet are at least on some level true; this is why he disassembled the revolver. 

 

“ _Substance_ is a funny word, isn’t it? They use it as a sort of generic stand-in for illegal chemical compounds. But we all use substances, don’t we?”

 

“I suppose it’s like any other euphemism,” Marjorie says. “It’s a way of shielding ourselves against unpleasantness.”

 

She’d had a dreadful look on her face, the victim. By her side a pathetic farewell scrawled on the back of a train timetable. He supposes it would be _normal_ or _healthy_ to say that he doesn’t like to remember these details, to recall them to the front of his mind with as much ease as he would Irene’s hair or the way she smiled when he knew what she was thinking, but her ending wasn’t so bad in the scheme of things, ten lonely minutes of haemorrhage then a merciful end. If she were conscious that long. There are worse things.

 

“Yes,” Sherlock says. “Yes, of course.” It’s best he pretends to remember what she’s speaking about. Worse things.

 

He has a flat above a second-hand bookseller in Lambeth. It’s rare for anybody to ever be there after seven at night. Nobody knows about it. He covered his tracks. He could go back to London. He could draw the blinds and sit back on the lumpy single bed and blast himself into oblivion. He could do that. Nobody would know. Nobody would know until it was too late.

 

…

 

“You know,” Watson says, “There’s no shame in it.”

 

Her voice is soft, tremulous with exhaustion – it must be the early hours of the morning, then. Sherlock’s knuckles are bruised and he can still smell the sour antiseptic-sweat smell of the lockup on his clothes; he’s been sitting on the roof for hours. He feels unspeakably ashamed, shame beyond speaking, a shame so large it clamps his throat shut.

 

The sky has lightened incrementally when she speaks again. “You’re trembling. You should come inside and have a shower."

 

If you were a psychiatrist, Sherlock thinks, eventually I’d have to tell you everything: how another boy at school started beating me, and eventually forcing-but-not-forcing me to have sex with him. I suppose eventually I’d capitulate and say, yes, he just forced me. I’d tell you that I have the dubious distinction of having lost a lover only to find her again in the form of an international criminal kingpin, and that when I saw her again I thought I couldn’t stand. I suppose I’d have to tell you all these things, and I suppose we’d have to search for meaning in them, or you’d parse some kind of meaning from the way I related them to you.

 

We admitted that we were powerless.

 

He’s in the hall upstairs when the nausea overpowers him. He vomits first into his cupped hand and then onto the skirting board. He makes it to the toilet for the next wave. He wants to use heroin. He wants so badly to use heroin again that the desire obliterates almost everything else. There is no conclusion to be made, only the want.  He curls himself up on the bathroom floor and breaths in and out; the desire and the sickness are so profound he can do nothing else.

 

He can hear Watson climbing the stairs. She pauses in the hall outside the bathroom for thirty seconds; he can hear her standing there.  She doesn’t speak. She runs water into the bath. She takes something that rattles like pills out of the medicine cabinet, lays a towel and some clothes and a bottle of water on the vanity, then closes the door.

 

Lukewarm water lapping at his ribcage. The gnawing emptiness in his stomach. It comes to Sherlock in time, his mind blank and empty and so slow, that he wanted to kill Oscar.

 

He supposes that she’d meant to kill him, eventually. Accidental overdose would have been the easiest. Posed suicide would have fit. She would have been free, then, to go back to the life she had before. He wonders when she changed her mind. He wonders, then, what on earth she could have found in him to love; what she found in between the coldness and the ups and the downs. The keenest mind she’d ever met. He could have gone with her. He could have run away with her; they would have ruled the world. 

 

He’ll tell Joan all of this in time. She deserves to know. She’s a far better person than he’ll ever be. What matters to her is clean and sober; she doesn’t understand the noise, how filthy and empty he feels.

 

Walking through the kitchen to his bedroom, he can barely look her in the eye. He can smell coffee, the gingery smell of her chicken soup.

 

“Will you sleep?”

“Doubtful,” he says; it takes what feels like thirty seconds for the words to come.

“We can talk if you like.”

“No,” he says, and then, “I’m sorry.”

“You don't need to apologise to me,” she says.

He doesn’t believe her; perhaps he will in time.


End file.
